1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an information processing apparatus and a method of operating the same, and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus and a method of operating the information processing apparatus, capable of easily and simply grasping the configuration of active applications in an environment where a plurality of applications are running on a plurality of servers.
2. Description of the Related Art
To effectively manage operations of an IT-based service system, it is commonly necessary to correctly grasp the current system configuration. On the other hand, recent service system is getting larger and larger due to introduction of system linkage technique, server virtualization technique, etc. When such a large-scale service system is to be managed, a difficulty may occur to the system administrator to correctly manage the current configuration of the service system. Because of such a difficulty, the system administrator may experience delay in recognizing or may fail to recognize any failure or configurational change of the service system, which may result in enormous damage to the service.
A prior art of Japanese Patent No. 3177999 specification is an example of a method of automatically displaying the configuration information of a service system. Japanese Patent No. 3177999 specification discloses a method of automatically creating a system configuration diagram based on definition information describing the contents of a plurality of processes making up the system.
In accordance with the technique described in the above patent document, the system configuration diagram is automatically created by an output means that displays or prints out names of a plurality of groups obtained by classifying a service system. A specific procedure to automatically create the system configuration diagram is carried out by a means that, through the entry of the system administrator, stores a series of processes of the service system for featuring the groups classified when putting together the service system (e.g., the content of a process is whether the record is to be written when the definition element is a file), a means that analyzes processes of the service system to be classified and compares the results with a series of prestored processes to judge to which group the service system belongs, and the output means that displays or prints out the name of the classified group.
The method of the above patent document necessitates a processing unit that stores a series of processes of the service system for featuring the classified groups and requests the system administrator to enter the series of processes of the service system stored by the processing unit. The system administrator enters know-hows of the processes within the service system. Thus, to deal with a new process, maintenance of the know-hows is needed. If old know-hows are used intactly without any maintenance, the processes beyond the know-hows cannot be dealt with. Therefore, the service system executing such the processes cannot create correct service system configuration diagrams. This means that the system administrator cannot grasp the correct configuration of the current service system.
When displaying definition elements on a display screen of a management computer, if a multiplicity of service systems are to be administered, the definition elements cannot lie on a single screen because their display are not aggregated. This may render it difficult to grasp at a glance how many service systems exist.